So, we’ve never worked beyond the working prototype stage of the manipulator as it was just too hard to produce reliably. Until today. Those “in the know” are familiar with a new technology that is taking over the hacker/Maker scene: The MakerBot! It’s a consumer grade 3D printer that allows you to design objects in programs in SketchupUp, Rhino, or AutoDesk 123 and print them on your tabletop device. Few technologies have we witnessed over the past few years that are as exciting as this one. With the MakerBot, we were able to reduce the number of pieces (not counting screws) from 21 to 5, and assembly time from a week to half a day and decreasing. Here’s what it looks like, with a video.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Compare it to one of our earlier prototypes from ~two years ago.

We shipped this first production unit to our friends Mohsen Omrani and Ethan Hemming at Queen’s University at Kinston, Ontario, who are testing it in their undergraduate neuroscience lab course. We have 1-2 more design tweaks to implement, and then we plan to begin offering it for sale in 2-4 weeks, first in preassembed form and eventually in kit form (both will be priced similarly to the SpikerBox). Stay tuned! And yes, as with our all inventions, this is open-source. We will post all our .stl files and schematics so you can print it on your own 3D printer if you like.

We want to thank our new colleague Tiburcio De La Carcova for helping tremendously with the design and production over the last intense two weeks as we raced to complete the unit in time for Mohsen. Tiburcio is a lifelong hardware freak and co-founder of videogame company Atakama Labs in Santiago, Chile.

Though we haven’t formally announced it yet, we are currently spending some time back-and-forth between Michigan and Chile on a “StartUp Chile” fellowship to bring neuroscience to the schools and students of South America. Notably, this manipulator was “Hecho en Chile” in a brand new hackerspace Tiburcio is building to encourage invention in Santiago. ¡Viva la NeuroRevolucion! Tú vas a ver más español en nuestro sitio web en breve……

We brought the prototype to SfN; Stefan brought the special flies. Here at Backyard Brains we believe in real-time posters, so if you came by, you would seen us explaining how the prototype worked while Stefan was busy preparing the fruitfly larva for recording. Below Nature reporter Ewen Callaway talks to Stefan as he tries to use our micro-rig.

Ewen subsequently wrote a nice blog post on our gear for the Nature News site, but the best treat of all for us was returning to “Neuropod,” the Nature Neuroscience podcast. We were on the podcast three years ago when we first tried to present our gear and nothing worked. But we kept hacking away, and now, with all our gear fully operational, we were happy to bring the first spikes recorded live on Neuropod!

As astute listener may wonder why you only hear the standard cockroach leg spikes on the podcast. Where are the fruitfly muscle recordings? Weren’t we also talking about some optogenetic device? Show the data! We admit, it was still relatively early in the day when we spoke with Ewen, and Stefan was still trying to get his dissection right (he remarked the monocular microscope made the dissection difficult, and he would have preferred the gooseneck dissection lights to be longer. Noted for Gen4). But Stefan stayed focused, and at 2 PM Sunday afternoon we successfully recorded the critical piece of data: the electromyogram from the fruitfly muscle during presentation of blue light. It’s noisy, but in the recording below you can hear the increased activity from the muscle at ~2 seconds when Stefan turned on the blue light. The blue light caused the cholinergic motor neurons to depolarize, resulting in muscle contraction.

Expect us to release the designs for the micromanipulator (you could 3D print it yourself!) and LED control circuit in a month or so.

It was a busy SfN for us, as we also ran a symposium on “Low Cost Neuroscience” with our colleagues Bruce Johnson from Cornell, Jeff Wilson from Albion, a high school teacher from the D.C. area, Raddy Ramos from New York Institute of Technology, our friend Stefan, and our keynote speaker Ben Robbins, a 6th grader from Novi Meadows Middle School. Mr. Robbins taught the audience how to successfully do outreach to 5th graders. We don’t have access to age data of presenters at SfN, but we would venture to guess Mr. Robbins may have been the youngest presenter ever for the society.

Scientists, with their huge intellect and famous experiments, can sometimes be intimidating to approach. Thus, we were a bit cautious and sheepish when we asked Mr. Robbins if he would let us take a picture with him. Thankfully, he was cool with it.

Photo by Jeff Wilson

You can watch Mr. Robbins’ talk below in all its lo-fi hand held camera glory. Don’t worry, the shaking slows down about 20 seconds in.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Our good friend Moheb Costandi also wrote a detailed summary of the symposium for the Dana Foundation. Stay tuned in the months to come as we release more inventions!

For our prototype to allow portable demonstrations of optogenetics in transgenic fruit flies, we needed a neuroamplifier, a micromanipulator, a microscope, and LED light controller. Backyard Brains has its own amplifier (the SpikerBox), and we decided to go with an off-the-shelf inexpensive microscope rather than design our own optics. Thus, our design efforts focused on the manipulator, the LED control, and the biological preparation. We worked with five seniors in biomedical engineering (Emily, Zack, Nick, John, and Sharon, all from Southeastern Michigan) over about 12 weeks. We are happy to report we were successful in building a functional prototype that we then tested with scientist Stefan Pulver of Cornell University/University of Cambridge.Here is a picture of the prototype.

On April 17th, we successfully recorded EMG’s (electromyograms) from channelrhodopsin-2 expressing fruit flies using the prototype we built. These flies have ChR expressed in their glutamatergic neurons, and when blue light is flashed upon them, the muscles in their body wall contract. Using the manipulator to place the electrode on the exposed muscle, the microscope to view the dissection, the amplifier to record EMGs, and the LED controller to flash light, we had a fully contained optogenetics rig. Below you can listen to an audio recording of light-evoked EMG. It’s noisy, but you can hear the response!

Here are the students posing with their invention!

For our second prototype, which we are currently working on, we will increase the stability of the manipulator by combining the y and x-axis with the z-axis of the manipulator. We also need to improve the iPhone application that controls the LED. The biggest weakness of our design is more biological than mechanical; the Drosophila dissection takes expertise to do well. Once the stability improves, we will begin demoing this unit to high schools. We have actually already begun demonstrations of the behavioral responses of transgenic fruit flies to blue light. See below for some investigation by students at Winans Academy in Detroit.

We thank all the donators who contributed to this project, the hard working senior design students, and our colleague Stefan Pulver for providing the fruit flies, time, and expertise. We are bootstrapping the continued development; the work continues! Below is the exact cost breakdown of the use of the funds.

We gave a seminar recently on Feb. 25th to the undergraduate students at Grand Valley State University (thanks for the invite John and Merritt!), and we publicly unveiled a working prototype! Samara Woolfolk andStewart Berkos were the first eager students to try it out, and they agreed it worked. We believe in crowd-based peer review of real-time experiments. Being in pure speaking mode, we didn’t take any pictures or videos of the event, but here is Samara and Stewart posing after lunch…

And below is a movie of a basement experiment… Are you convinced?

We plan to offer the RoboRoach as a beta product soon. Stay tuned! In the meantime, we need to do a couple more experiments to ensure:

1) the wires stay in the antenna (principal failure point).

2) the preparation works reliably (at present we only get evoked movement in ~25% of our preps (n=30)…we are working hard to figure out the causes).

Let us know if you have any suggestions/advice! To the NeuroRevolution!

We know we can put a 10 uF capacity across pins 1 and 8 to increase to 200 gain, but stability goes out the window. If any analog electronics engineers in the world know an alternative low-cost, low-power audio driver, or a stable LM386 arrangement, please let us know; the solution is near.

Another common user request is to have the ability to both use the iPhone/iPad and hear the spikes at the same time. At the moment, the iPhone OS doesn’t allow playthrough (please Apple, do this for us?), but below is a cheap hardware solution that also solves the loudness issue. Go to your friendly neighborhood RadioShack, and purchase:

1) A mini Audio Amplifier for $14.99: This portable audio speaker amp will allow your spikes to be loud enough for a large classroom or lecture hall. It needs a 9V battery.

2) A Y-adapter for $3.59 to split the output of the SpikerBox to two outputs, so that you can plug in both the iPhone/iPad and the loud audio speaker

3) a 1/8 audio cablefor $3.99 to go from the SpikerBox (or Y-splitter plugged into the SpikerBox) to the audio speaker.

Note: the Y-adapter and audio cables listed are the monaural versions. The Stereo Versions (cable and Y-splitter links here) will also work fine but are $1-3 more. We usually buy the stereo versions anyway, as they are useful for other audio projects. Here is the standard lab class set-up. The iPad works even better for lecture halls.

Note: our kind friends at RadioShack customer service actually sent us the circuit diagram for the audio amplifier! This scan is how we actually received it. Notice they have put a transistor in front of the LM386. We are experimenting with a similar arrangement. Stay tuned!

We offer door to door bus service:

We have found that small hands are optimal for cutting the circuit boards:

Taking a hint from our friends at Hewlett-Pakard (recent firing decision aside), we use a form of paired production call “extreme soldering.” Such a method allows us to find errors early, and reduces quality control costs.

We have also found we can increase savings by having employees share a pair of shoes, and observing a strict “no TV distraction” policy.

One unexpected benefit of having young staff is that they are not socially sophisticated enough to develop passive-aggressive tendencies, which are hard to spot but devastating to production for most companies. We can easily tell when morale is low.

We address morale problems by reassigning staff to cockroach husbandry when appropriate.

And with the enclosure, which we also provide in the kit.

Here is a picture of our first customer who ordered the bag of parts version. Yes, Luis does have a MakerBot behind him. With such a 3D printer you can build your own enclosure. Unleash the output of your mind and hands, my fellow creatives!

Wrap all exposed wire in electrical tape, cover with heat shrink tubing, and you’re ready to rock! This design splices the left and right audio channels in the microphone input, so if you use this cable to record music, you are only recording in mono.

This of course is our favorite use…